Trump’s Mount Rushmore Speech Showed Why Our Battle Over History Is So Fraught

The creation of Mount Rushmore in the 1920s attempted to gloss over this violent history with triumphant narratives of western expansion and freedom. Historian Doane Robinson, who had written on South Dakota history, came up with the idea in 1923. Robinson envisioned a memorial directing tourism to a Midwestern state experiencing early symptoms of the Great Depression because of diminishing production prices crippling South Dakota’s farm economy. Robinson wrote to U.S. Sen. Peter Norbeck of South Dakota that the handiwork of one sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, would “‘sell’ the Black Hills and [Custer State] Park as nothing else could.”

Borglum was, in the words of a recent profile of the memorial, a “larger-than-life weirdo.” Born into a polygamous Mormon family near Ovid, Idaho, to Danish immigrants in 1867, Borglum would go on to become a confidant of presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He was a barnstormer for the National Progressive Party and agrarian Nonpartisan League, an aviation aficionado and engineer, and servant of the second Ku Klux Klan.

Borglum originally envisioned Mount Rushmore as a shrine to the westward course of empire. He explained to an audience in Rapid City, S.D., in 1925 that the monument would honor the “empire builders” by celebrating the “founder” and “savior” of America — George Washington and Abraham Lincoln respectively — and Thomas Jefferson, “the first great expansionist” who had secured the Louisiana Purchase. The fourth president who would be featured, Borglum’s friend Roosevelt, had “thrust himself upon the western plains” as a grieving younger man mourning the deaths of his wife and mother, and had expanded the American empire via the Panama Canal. The sculptor proclaimed, “If you carve … these empire-builders the whole world will speak of South Dakota.”

Americans embraced Borglum’s vision for his sculpture. When President Calvin Coolidge chose to vacation in the Black Hills in 1927, he gave a speech at the site emphasizing that the monument was to be carved on a mountain “no white man had ever beheld” in the times of Washington, in a territory “acquired by the action of Jefferson,” which “remained an almost unbroken wilderness beyond the days of Lincoln, which was especially beloved by Roosevelt.” Coolidge was asking his audience to conceptualize the scope and triumph of Manifest Destiny — the idea that America’s advancement westward to the Pacific was ordained by God.

And this theme didn’t fade with time. In 1991, at the 50th anniversary of the completion of the monument, President George H.W. Bush reiterated this history. Bush mentioned Jefferson had “expanded our boundaries forever” through the Louisiana Purchase, that Lincoln expanded the “technological frontier” via the Transcontinental Railroad and Roosevelt was a “warrior” who “cut the Panama Canal out of the wilderness.”

President Trump also invoked this history during his blistering speech at the monument.